Elena Colombi’s Osàre! Editions complete a strong ’22 program with Emil Valev’s first volley of dark, fizzing, avant new wave landing on the senses like a fantasy adjunct to Suicide, Uri Katzenstein, Victor De Roo.

This is the first release, proper, by the deep Euro wave outlier. It’s an open invitation to his worldbuilding style, splicing rugged post-industrial/darkwave with more fragrant Eastern melodies and cosmic inspirations in a spectrum of driving, intuitively arranged works that span decades and add up to a singular depiction of the artist’s take on well-trodden tropes. Brimming with exactly the sort of screwballs you might hear in Elena Colombi DJ sets, ‘Gentle Reactor’ runs a personalised sort of voodoo down from the snake-hipped noir of ‘Vdahnovenie’ to the dry drum machine crack and sensuous Mid-Eastern melodies of ‘Black Cat’, taking in what sounds like Suicide’s cosmic side project on ‘Haotichen Izgrev’ and grinding wave sleaze in ‘Exhibition’, next to the steamy groove of ‘Dvigatel’ with its slithering, reverse-looped vocals and bezonnkked concrète sound arrangement of ‘Rain Thoughts’. There’s a darkly playful mind at work here, patiently deep into their own thing on the skewed lounge groover ‘Give me all your love III’, and working to the classiest, lusting sort of Euro-Orientalist schematics on ‘Slow Dancer’ recalling the thrust of Uri Katenzstein’s recently reappraised doozies on Black Truffle as much as Jac Berrocal and co, with prime late night essence in the likes of ‘Kwarks’ or the mystic cosmic beauty of ‘Hope’.